Some Jewish people saw the Holocaust coming with total clarity — they understood almost immediately the pull of fascism and the weakness of the opposition. They decoded the fake news. Others insisted that the checks and balances of the new normal would buffer the vulnerable — that a basic well of human decency could never run so dry that so many millions would have to live the unimaginable. They bought the big lies that still are being told.
For those with foresight, the lack of it in their friends and family often was the source of unspeakable agony.
Never — and I mean never — have I seen that anguish more potently expressed than on the upstairs stage of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater by the actor Sean Fortunato in the world premiere of "The Book of Joseph" by Karen Hartman.
MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR
It’s only two words: "Get out," Fortunato says, again and again, the actor’s eyes welling with what reads as a mix of fury at his character’s relatives, pain that the evils of racist identification should present them with so bleak an imperative, and utter contempt for the inadequacy of his own powers of persuasion.
"Get out."
God, you think as you watch an actor giving the performance of his professional life how many people had to scream some version of that at the loving but oblivious, only to be told don’t worry, or we don’t want to leave our home, or some version of this regime soon will change!
This real-life Polish-Jewish-American family story is directed by Barbara Gaines with such an intensity of emotion, such a determination to draw parallels to the present, to remind an audience to love those who will die soon, to pay attention to changes in the world, that I’ve decided this is the most personally intense thing Gaines ever has directed in Chicago. You can find some flaws in the writing and staging of the piece — which is, after all, new — but the wave of emotion is of an intensity and a ubiquity that those issues matter little. Hartman — a deconstructionist writer who favors the contextual look and who is occasionally detoured from the direct, risky revelation of human truth by her academic interest in the structural assumptions of narrative, can be dry. Gaines — the opposite of a post-modernist — leads theatrically with her feelings. About us in the now. Usually, she’s right on the nose. She goes big when it comes to point of view. But the combination of these two women is really something. They both bring out the best in the other.
"The Book of Joseph" is the real-life story of Joseph A. Hollander, a man who got himself out of Poland. Physically. Never in his heart.
A wealthy Polish attorney, the far-sighted Joseph gets out of Krakow with his wife before the Final Solution gathers pace, albeit only into the limbo of the stateless. But he makes his way to America — an America initially unsympathetic to the plight of the refugee, but, Hollander being an immigrant who gets the job done, he persists. He abides. And throughout all of his wanderings and deal-making, he worries constantly for his family back in Poland. He tries again and again to get them out. He sends them papers. He does everything he can. And he writes to them. His letters disappear along with their recipients.
But Joseph keeps the letters that the family members write to him and, after he is dead, they are found by his son Richard (Francis Guinan) They are the play. The conceit is that Richard (the real Richard Hollander was in the audience on Navy Pier on Saturday night) is on a book tour. That gets us through Act 1. Thereafter, "The Book of Joseph" turns more into "The Book of Richard," Richard the repository of a record of a hate-fueled era now retreating from memory to history. In Act 2 (following a contrived transition that needs more work), Richard has to deal with the inquiries of his own son, Craig (Adam Wesley Brown), a chip off the old Hollander block and a sculptor with, thank God for everyone, the benefit of more chronological remove from pain and heroism.
The quiet exit of memory and testimony is one of the central points of the play, actually, and one with enough force to shock. I confess I had not thought of the moment when survivors gathered for the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s "Schindler’s List" as a historic moment now impossible to re-create. I still think of it as the now. Wrong. That now was more than 20 years ago. Those people have died now. Those chances are gone now.
And while I’m on what pulled me up short, think of this too. This show really makes you think about how most of the communication in human history was riven by a time lag. In World War II, people always found out things late. We’re constantly told in this piece of those who married or divorced or died months before — grief at the latter came upon notification, not in the moment. So it was through almost all of human history. It is harder and harder to get your head around what that means now.
In some ways, this is a family history not unlike others, and it based on the real Richard Hollander’s understandable but hardly unbiased desire to give his dad a place a history. So stipulated. But we all have that right, and the case is made. Moreover, the Hollander family letters have some things that make them distinct.
The Hollanders were wealthy Jews with a high standing in pre-war Poland, and thus the Nazis let them remain longer in their lives, and thus allowed them to write longer. They were not only highly educated and secular but masters of understatement and code, which meant that they got more information past the censors than most, the Nazi readers hardly being their intellectual match.
And they loved each other and you write more when you love. Or you did, anyway.
Still, this is a story told with gaps and questions, all of which Hartman considers, even as Guinan, whose performance is deeply moving, explores the other side of this play, which is what to do with the information you are given from your father.
If you’ve ever cleared out an attic and wondered what the heck to do with the papers that make up a life lived through trauma, if you’ve sat by the trash in despair, throwing away nothing, then everything, then nothing again, this is your show. Most of us are in some state of denial about the past. Most of us are reluctant to open up the book of our parents. Fully, I mean. All of that is in play here.
The actors clearly grasp the magnitude of their responsibilities here, and from Amy J. Carle to Mikey Gray, Patricia Lavery to Ron E. Rains, from Gail Shapiro to the haunting Brenann Stacker, you can see them merely trying to do justice to those who died but whose brave words live on. They surely do.
At the start of the piece, Hartman has Richard say that he is surprised anyone has come out at all, being as Holocaust stories rarely have legs. I resisted that meta moment at first — self-awareness can be an insecurity and this book of letters needs no apology. But this is, it turns out, unlike any Holocaust play you will have been seen, mostly because it is so clearly concerned with what we do about all of this now. Good question, no?
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
Review: "Book of Joseph" (4 stars)
When: Through March 5
Where: Chicago Shakespeare Upstairs Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $38-$58 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com
RELATED STORIES:
‘Salute to Tony Bennett’ is a night out for you and your valentine
‘Hamilton’ review update: Wayne Brady and the ghost of Obama
Review: ‘Bodyguard’ needs at least to try to make sense of the movie
Check out the latest movie reviews from Michael Phillips and the Chicago Tribune.
Check out reviews for all new music releases from Tribune music critic Greg Kot.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
